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Dessert

Date Cake

A sweet cake made with dates, butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, milk, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Date Cake

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Date Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the butter, sugar, and egg until smooth.

  2. Sift the baking powder with the flour.

  3. Add the flour mixture alternately with the milk to the butter mixture.

  4. Fold in the chopped dates.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. Once cooled, cut into squares, ice, and place a date on each square.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the cake a tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the cake rise and become light.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps set the structure as it bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour to form the batter.
Dates
Add natural sweetness and moist, chewy pockets throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Add the flour mixture alternately with the milk. Alternating flour and liquid in small additions keeps the batter smooth and limits gluten development, which helps the cake stay tender rather than tough.

Swap the dates

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, milk, egg, flour, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, egg, flour, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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